The tent diaries 6

“On such a trip as mine, so much there is to see and to think about that event and thought set down as they occurred would roil and stir like a slow-cooking minestrone.” - John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley

I was wrong about Wednesday's post being my final tent diaries entry. I remember I wrote this kind of sloppy epilogue after I returned to Sarasota. 

People who had followed my journey in the newspaper said I ended things so abruptly with no tidy conclusion or rewarding epiphany. Of course by then it was too late. I had hogged full-page spreads in the newspaper for six weeks. So for myself and my friends I wrote this, a little thank you note. 

I was feeling pretty sappy and as usual, verbose. 

--

Wednesday, July 11, 2007

The Oregon Coast & Thank You
Just did the dishes. Zac cooked bean burritos for dinner tonight. I cut up cubes of cheese and tomatoes. We listened to This American Life. Max won cards. Rachel drank White Russians. Cubbie licked Sadie's ears and teeth and I told some stories about Oregon and Wyoming using accents and flailing hand gestures.

I reached Bandon, Oregon at ten o'clock at night and if I had approached the end of the continental United States the coast of Oregon gave no warning. Like a security blanket, high bluffs and forests shield the Oregon Coast. When you drive from Klamath Falls to Bandon there are only subtle hints of the Pacific Ocean. The dark is pitch dark. (So much of coastal Oregon reminded me of a previous trip to Rhode Island.) I S-curved down highways and through national forests. I constructed in my head the image of the United States. The shape of my country, kind of like a chicken breast.

I rolled down my windows. The night looked like it might feel cooler and it did. I could smell it. The coolness and the ocean. The air felt like cellophane. I hung my arm out the window, flattened my palm and let the resistance turn my fingers into peninsulas. Peninsulas like Florida. I missed Florida. For the first time since moving to Sarasota three years ago, I had, during a phone conversation with Joe, called Sarasota "home." Used the word without hesitation. I missed my home. I missed Joe. This I was sure of. So many nights I narrowed my eyes like Matilda, beaming him into my tent whenever I felt lonely or I wanted to share something spectacular with him. Like, "Hey didja see those wild horses humping each other today?"

I missed my friends and that became more apparent as I went about my daily business without once laughing. I love to laugh goddamit! Without human company when do you laugh? What's there to laugh about? What does your laugh sound like when you're alone in your car, your tent, on the side of a dirt road? It sounds psychotic that's what. Lunatic. Laugh alone sometime without a television on, or a radio station dialed in, or a good book on your lap. Laugh without any of these devices and you're bat shit crazy.

I laughed anyway. With my hand out the window and my fingers like peninsulas, I laughed. Cubbie poked his head out the window and left it there for some time until I took a corner too hard and jolted him back into his seat. If the trees weren't so high I'd have seen stars.

Route 101, the Pacific Coast Highway, runs like a braided ponytail up the coast. I reached it and turned left. I had never seen the Pacific Ocean and now at every traffic light I craned my head out the window — was I there yet? Would I drive off the United States like Thelma and Louise? I could hear the crash of water on rocks. Crashing like tambourines! It was ten o'clock at night and I had traveled the width of my country. Sound the trumpets. Yet no trumpets would sound.

I would reach Bandon, where thanks to Joe I'd manage to get a $200 hotel room for the $60 military rate. Good luck? Good karma? Did I deserve either? I was so sick of the sight of myself. People had treated me so kind along the way. They were what I had expected — good, kind, curious and eccentric. How I like my people.

Before I left Sarasota my coworkers at European Marble handed me an envelope containing $200 in twenty dollar bills. My tent, my table, my cooler, the picnic basket, the propane burner, boxes of couscous, cans of tomato soup … all of them given to me by friends and coworkers. 

On the night before I left Sarasota Zac hosted a dinner where he cooked my favorite author's favorite foods. John Steinbeck's beer milk shakes. Hemingway's gazpacho. He invited my friends over and we toasted my trip from a plastic table set up in our apartment parking lot. Then he handed over a brown paper bag filled with Shell gas station gift cards. The cards took me as far as Chicago, and I saved one for my return trip. Redeemed it in Dade City, Florida. As I pumped my last tank of gas, I kissed the magnet strip. 

The unfolded roadmap on my wall with thumbtacks in it had become more dream than journey. More challenge than vacation. A rite of passage in my own head and in no other. The Mormons go on a two-year mission. I drive alone from one coast of the Unites States to the other.

In Estes Park, Colorado I'd treat myself to a mandarin chicken salad, a People magazine and a Blockbuster movie courtesy again of my boyfriend, who would treat me again to chicken fingers and curly fries at a diner with a name I wished I remembered in Bear Lake, Utah.

In Boise, Idaho I'd eat Cracker Barrel mac and cheese on Susan Holsing, a former European Marble coworker, who bestowed upon me a Cracker Barrel gift card that, if I continued to eat $3 mac and cheese off the kid's menu, would get me from Tampa to Portland.

Today in Sarasota, I met Rog and Ricci for coffee at Starbucks where, thanks to Jason and Jess, I treated us all to iced coffees in the titty-sweltering humidity.

So! This is the last blog. Finito. I did it. I write way too much anyway. I use too many metaphors and too many similes. I abuse similes like a drunk abuses– fuck, see.

I'm listening to the CDs Teisha gave me in Springfield, Missouri. Cubbie will be getting a bath soon. The walls in my bedroom are empty, save for an old drawing and my map of the United States with the thumbtacks in it. I'm debating whether or not to donate my bed to Goodwill as the house I'm moving into in a few weeks is fully furnished. I like my bed. It's a nice bed. Pillow top mattress. But it's a bed. It's stuff. A thing.

I guess what I'm getting at (what I was getting at 1,000 words ago) is thank you. Thank you to everyone who helped me along the way. People are better than stuff, better than places, and I'm ecstatic once and for all to be back in Sarasota with my people.

Thanks for reading.

The tent diaries 5

Just before I left Florida, my friend Ricci gave me a dragonfly, with this message written on the wings:

“All that glitters is not gold. All who wander are not lost.”

I’m sleepy now as I write this. Uninspired for the most part, sneezing in an auto repair shop, where I’m getting the oil changed in Joe’s car. It’s 9 a.m. on a Wednesday and I’m drinking Timmy Ho’s out of a plastic travel mug. Mechanic's coffee is always too black and too dank for my taste buds, so I usually bring my own. 

I’m listening to Ani as usual, and to the woosh of power tools ripping lug nuts off tires in the shop. It’s sunny out and what I really want to do right now is curl up like a cat in the light cast by the vertical blinds hanging in the front window. 

I brought a book and my laptop – the laptop so I could write an intro to this last installment of tent diaries and a book so I wouldn’t have to write.

Life is banal and beautiful no matter where you are. That’s what the road taught me; what staying with strangers and friends taught me. People's lives are no more or no less glamorous than your own, whether you live in Athens, Ill. or Sisters, Ore. 

Nature is nebulous and left entirely to interpretation. I fell in love with the trees in Oregon. I fell in love with the sky in Idaho. I would have married a sandwich in Wyoming had a notary been present. I got shitty directions from a boney hag in the Ozarks and shitty directions from a plump doe-eyed girl standing beside a fly strip in southern Oregon.

I was flagged down on a highway somewhere between Wyoming and Utah by a 40-something couple, whom I lent my cell phone to and pathetically my tire iron, which of course was too small to help change the flat on their empty horse trailer. 

Before I even opened my mouth they told me they were from Sarasota, Fla., heading to Oregon to pick up a horse, which of course was laughably surreal given that I was coming from Sarasota and heading to Oregon too. 

I had driven thousands of miles, met dozens of people, mowed through three loaves of bread and an entire jar of peanut butter and here I was, on a desolate stretch of brown highway somewhere between Utah and Wyoming, handing my cell phone over to people from Sarasota. Processing this information caused my mind to explode into stars. I coughed and laughed and stomped my feet. It was the most understated well-I'll-be-damned moment of the entire trip. 

Not a single vehicle passed us during our 45-minute exchange. 

--

Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Bear Lake, Utah
Knocked my socks off.

--

Thursday, June 28, 2007

Twin Falls, Idaho
There was a three and half hour traffic backup on I-84 outside of Twin Falls, Idaho. People were moseying about their parked vehicles, truckers kept getting out of their cabs pounding the sides of their tires with hammers to make sure they were what — not leaking (I don't know.) It was 6 pm. The sky was starting to fade from baby blue to watery pink. The clouds looked like taffy. The moon cocked curiously to my left as the sun did that thing it sometimes does in the summer— it gave an encore performance. The night wouldn't settle on Idaho and I wondered if it was because I was so close to (but not in) the Pacific Time Zone. Sprinklers lined the fields in straight ghostly patterns, water arching like colorless rainbows across the green. I rolled down my windows to a cool, sweatshirt-y night. The couple in the Toyota Tundra in front of me said it was a major accident two miles ahead. We'd be stuck for several hours. Jesus. We'd been at a standstill for over an hour already. I was about to ask if they knew any other way to get to my campsite but I looked at their plates and saw they were from Montana.

The girl in the Hyundai behind me had Idaho tags so I asked her if she had any suggestions. (The last time I set up a tent in the dark I hammered my thumb numb with a Dollar General mallet.)

"No other way to your highway than to stick it out here til this accident clears," she said. "That's what I'm gonna do."

She was so sweet and peaceful, on her way home from work. She was wearing black work pants and an undershirt. An hour later I walked back to her car. She was sitting with her windows down, contentedly listening to the radio. I offered her my bag of Oreos.

"Really?" She asked.

"Really," I said. "Take it. I've got plenty of food in this car. I've kind of been living out of it."

Feeling like I'd slighted the couple from Montana I walked up their window with my box of banana bread from Laramie, Wyoming. They too were starving and graciously accepted. They thought Cubbie was cute and well behaved considering the traffic backup. I was very proud of him and when I got back to my car I pieced up some banana bread for Cubbie too.

As the sun fell it peek-a-booed behind the sprinklers, the ch-ch-ch of the water hitting the fields put me at ease. It was the most beautiful summer night I've seen since leaving my home in New York. The stars looked like someone flicked them into place. The sky spread so seamlessly flat it looked like my mother had hung it out to dry. Two miles further up the interstate two people died on the side of the road. A semi truck was on its side. I was reading a book; the couple from Montana was eating banana bread, the girl from Idaho was eating Oreos. I covered the moon with my thumb. The horizon, unmistakable, moved me to tears.

--

Friday, July 06, 2007

Klamath Falls, Oregon
This is a story of expectations, highways and disappointments:

When I reached Klamath Falls, Oregon at 9 o'clock in the evening I was deliriously tired. I had gained one hour of daylight and I was ungrateful for it.

My day had started in Jerome, Idaho with a blueberry muffin, scrambled eggs and a long hot shower. I had shaved my legs for Oregon. Wore my favorite dress for Oregon. And then I'd driven for ten hours through Oregon.

If you've even driven through Oregon or plan on doing so know this — there is only one interstate in Oregon and it runs north to south. Its only concern is getting you to Portland and then finally Seattle. That is the objective of I-5. It begins (or ends, whichever way you look at it) in San Diego, California and goes as far as Blaine, Washington. It takes you from the Mexican border to the Canadian. It does not take you through the guts of Oregon. That is the burden of the highway. The highways (and there are a few) will take you through the fibrous, pulpous, and at times mystical region known as central Oregon. These highways are fantastic and frightening. They make you feel infinitesimal. They cut through desert, through forests, climbing the sides of mountains and spanning valleys. They remind you that you are composed of water. That people need people. That you could scramble up the rocks, reach the top of a plateau, crawl into a crevice and disappear. Those who pass through would never know you existed and it would mean nothing to them if you were to ever emerge again. If you're feeling lonely these highways will make you feel lonelier. If you are looking for vindication these highways will not vindicate you. If you're feeling lost these highways will not find you and they will not lead you to a place where you are found. If you are looking for answers to questions you've not solved in years, these highways will not answer them. They will however roll out before you like a tattered scroll as you drive 90 mph and they will let you doggedly work things out in your head. They will absorb the things that have plagued you. That is what they do. They run east to west and they absorb you, cleanse you, and wring you out like a wet rag. Highways like the Outback Byway, the Volcanic Legacy Byway, the Central Oregon Highway… They will crawl inside your head and claw at the parts that make you feel safe and warm. Every fifty miles a town will appear along these highways and you will take that town with you wherever you go. The people who live there will ride with you wherever you go because that is the only way some of these people ever leave. On more than four occasions I asked for directions in south-central Oregon.

"Can you please tell me the best way to get to Bend?"
"No clue."
"How about to Crater Lake. How far am I from Crater Lake?"
"Sorry. Can't help ya."
"Are you familiar with Oregon?"
"Yeah. Born and raised in Klamath Falls."
"But Crater Lake is supposed to be close to Klamath Falls."
"Yeah, beats me."

I was 45 minutes from Crater Lake, the deepest lake in the United States. I found it easily using my maps, my books, my compass, and the northern star. I exhausted every navigational tool I had in the state of Oregon.

In Klamath Falls I checked into my campsite. I was still wearing that goddamn dress. Cubbie was restless, buckled into the passenger seat. The Klamath Falls campground was also the Klamath Falls gas station and liquor store. I was cut in line by a man and a woman buying two 40 oz Budwesiers. They reeked like smoke and booze. They had six teeth between the two of them and I wanted to say, excuse me I'm waiting in line here. I've been driving all day to get here. I have a date with Oregon. Can't you see? But I didn't speak up, just backed up, gave them their space and let them cash out. When their credit card was declined I didn't roll my eyes. I was patient. I picked through the Oregon postcards on the wall.

"Just run one through," the woman slurred.

The clerk ran one bottle through. The card was accepted. The drunkards rejoiced, walked away with one brown bag, six teeth and in the case of the woman — no shoes.

I asked for a tent site for one night please. One night in Klamath Falls and then I'd be off in the morning.

"How close am I to the Oregon coast?"

"Umm … I'm not sure."

"Any suggestions on the best route to the coast?"

"Mm. I haven't been to the coast in years."

"Are you familiar with any east-west highways?"

"I uh, don't know. Maybe the people at Walmart might know."

--

Friday, July 06, 2007

Bubble Burst, Oregon
The things I did not photograph are the things I cherished the most.

I'm home now. I'm in St. Pete. Sitting in Joe's apartment. The pug is asleep next to me. His fur matches Joe's couch. Joe's at work. I'm watching the Cartoon Network. I'm wearing the green sweatshirt I bought in Bandon, Oregon.

The drive home cost me some fingernails, a flat tire, a dented muffler and one sleepless night from one end of Nebraska to the other. When, at 6:30 in the morning, I could not find a motel with any vacancies in the entire state of Nebraska, the kid working the front desk at a Holiday Inn said, "Sorry, no rooms left." I snapped, "You have got to be fucking kidding me," I knew I just needed to get myself home.

It was actually Joe's idea to go to the coast. I was defeated. I'd reached Klamath Falls and I was defeated. I'd driven as far as I could drive. Two drunks in a campground underneath a highway overpass had cut me in line. I had not eaten properly in days and anytime I attempted to eat properly the food wouldn't go down. I was homesick. Homesick and too stubborn to admit it … until eventually I did and it came pouring out.

"I think you should drive to the coast."

"I had a picture of Klamath Falls picked out in my atlas. It looks nothing like the picture. It looks nothing like the picture because the picture was of Multnomah Falls. I had the wrong friggen waterfall."

He told me to calm down. (He's good at that.) I calmed down. He'd mapquest the coast for me. I was only six hours from the Pacific. I should get some sleep, go see Crater Lake and keep going west. I should pick out a place on the ocean and just calm down. I should relax because it would all work out. These things always do. And then, he said … I should just come home. He missed me.

My funds were running out. Totally running out. I needed two days in one place that did not involve ten hours in a '97 Honda Civic that smelled like a Dutch oven. I picked out a dot on the Oregon Coast. Bandon, Oregon — a coastal town as far west as I could go. My heart filled with blood. Blood poured through my arteries, and like a nest of sleeping spiders, my veins and arteries perked up, carried the blood to my brain. The same surge that compelled me in Sarasota to pack up my car for Oregon compelled me to quit fucking complaining and keep going. I was almost there for god sakes.

In the morning I ate what was left of my stale banana bread. I spread out a sheet under a tree and read my Albert Einstein book until I reckoned it was time for Crater Lake and then I took down my tent, rolled up my sleeping bag, fed Cubbie some Alpo and buckled us both back into the Dutch Oven Civic.

--

PS. The first picture is of Crater Lake in Southern Oregon on the crest of the Cascade Mountain Range. Below it are my sneakers, all wet and sandy from running into the Pacific Ocean for the first time in my life. 

I fell for him dressed as Courtney Love

It was a blip of a moment in an overly air-conditioned bedroom.

Joe was wearing a souvenir alien T-shirt from Area 51. I was wearing his heaviest red sweater. We both had our glasses on, which doesn't happen often because Joe hates wearing his glasses. He says they make him dizzy.

I was about to embark on a solo road trip from Sarasota, Florida. to Bandon Beach, Oregon, which Joe ever so delicately suggested I return from.

Stubborn, fiercely independent, and at times straight-up flighty, I couldn't promise him that. At least not in the beginning.

The first time we met, I was standing by the Pac-Man game at a bar in St. Pete, drinking Miller Lite and making good on a dare by pole dance around a fat oak beam.

When he asked me about myself, I told him how my family had installed a corn-burning furnace in the basement of their Western New York home, and how when it burned, the whole house smelled like Orville Redenbacher's.

The second time we met, I told him I was outta here, that I was moving to Oregon or Idaho or Montana. I told him I was writing a book about a girl who spends her days righting ordinary wrongs, who makes a living on a ranch and sleeps in a hayloft that smells like manure and maple syrup.

"I have to live if I want to write it," I said nonchalantly.

We were at a birthday party in Sarasota, at a bar with a punching bag. I was dressed as Courtney Love - pink baby doll dress, combat boots, mascara smudges, the whole getup. The theme was "high school flashback," and I was never so happy to resurrect the 90s. A 1993 graduate of an all-boys Jesuit high school in Tampa, Joe was wearing a too-tiny suit and tie that made him look like Ben Stiller.

I told him I was reading a memoir by Mary Karr that was written like none other I'd read before. He asked me if my novel would be a memoir and I replied that it was pompous to write a memoir at the age of 25.

"Not that what I'm writing isn't mostly true anway," I conceded.

I was chugging too many Miller Lites, filming the party for my roommate Zac, confessing on camera in a slurred lisp that I was fed-up with doing his dishes.

Joe drove me home that night in his blue Honda Accord. Unlike most of the cars that belonged to people I knew, his was immaculate.

We went back to our friends, Max and Meredith's house - a beach cottage - where we drank some more, played games and ate leftover pasta from the fridge. Joe heated up a bowl of bow tie macaroni with red sauce, and in between rounds of (was it Taboo?) he offered me several spoonfuls, which I found comforting.

As we sat there on the steps leading into Max and Meredith's 10-by-10 living room, our knees touched. Joe was still dressed in his Jesuit uniform. I was still dressed as Courtney Love. Spooning noodles out of his bowl and into my mouth, it was as if I had slopped off his plate for years.

When he walked outside to have a cigarette, I stumbled out of the living room with my roommate and left. It was late and I was tired.

The third time I saw him we were on an actual date. At the urging of my roommate, who had observed our Lady and the Tramp pasta moment, I went ahead and asked Max for Joe's phone number.

"Tell me he's not one of those too-nice, sappy guys," I said.

"No, but he's not an asshole either if that's what you're asking," Max replied.

For four days his number sat untouched. Written on a Post-It note and stuck to a cardboard-box-night stand by my bed, I agonized over making the first move. I was nervous. Feeling sheepish. Feeling like perhaps I drank too much that night, or that I had left coldly without saying goodbye.

When I finally called, he answered on the second ring. He knew right away who I was and why I was calling. He fired off date plans like a semi-automatic pistol, as I joked that simply willing your phone to dial on its own never works.

"Lucky for you, you picked up on the second ring," I said. "I probably would have hung up on the third."

Yes, I had bigger balls in 8th grade, but I was hellbent on moving to Oregon, or Idaho, or Montana. If the way we shared pasta were any indication of things to come, Oregon, Idaho, Montana - all of it - would scarcely measure up.

However, none of these moments were as compelling as the one I mentioned earlier that came two months later, a week before my Jack Kerouac-ian gallivant across the country.

We were lying on his bed - Joe in his souvenir alien T-shirt, me in his heaviest red sweater, and the pug curled up like a Roman snail beside us.

He was questioning my blind love for the Dakotas. I was romanticizing The Badlands. Reaching around my side, he kissed me somewhere near my armpit and said, "If your body were the United States, this would be South Dakota."

Though not in agreement, I let him go on.

Next, he kissed my elbow. Called it Iowa. Then my wrist. Called it Missouri. My spine - Oregon. And on it went. Lazily, languidly, and with no regard for geographic accuracy, he mapped out my road trip with kisses.

When he finally reached my lips, our glasses clanked together like timpani drums.

He didn't say it, but I knew. In that overly air-conditioned bedroom, in that heavy red sweater, in our similarly prescribed eyeglasses, his lips were home.

--

PS. Joe proposed last week. I said yes.

Existential scavenger hunting

Distractions are everywhere.

I woke up this morning first at 7:30 and then at 8:30. At 8:30 I shuffled to the kitchen. Made coffee. Made toast. Sat on the couch and opened this page. Two and half hours later I've accomplished nothing. Nothing. I blame MySpace, Facebook and random news stories about Broncos players diagnosed with diabetes, Britney's preggo sister, a story about an Asian man whose skin turned to tree bark and another story about an Asian man whose face developed gargantuan tumors spilling out from under his chin like tsunamis of yellow flesh. Freakish stuff. This is what I chose to do with my precious three hours before Joe wakes up.

(He's still sleeping by the way.)

Maybe if I go out on the porch in the sunshine.

Anyway. When I was in Gaitlinburg, Tenn. last summer I set up camp beside a 20-something couple from Baton Rouge. Their names were Rachel and Shawn. Newly engaged. I remember several key things about Rachel and Shawn. Namely that their tent leaked in a rainstorm that night and Rachel, totally pissed about this, stormed Shawn's truck like an army sergeant first thing in the morning, hauling armfuls of wet clothes into the cab, cursing in a southern tongue that their "god damned Wal-Mart tent was a piece of goddamned shit." I also remember that Shawn surveyed my car one night between bites of Smores and said, "That's a Honda HX yer drivin there." And I nodded and said yes. And he said, "Funny. I never seen an HX before." And that was that.

I think about it often. Probably every day since that night in Tennessee. Whenever I'm driving and I pass another Civic, I check out the rear model name - LX. EX. CX. DX. Never HX. I drove from Sarasota, Fla. to Coos Bay, Oregon and not once did I spot an HX on the road, in a parking lot, at a traffic light. I was floored by this, so floored that I made a habit of announcing the make and model of every Civic I passed from there on.

"LX. Not an HX."
"EX. Not an HX."

It is a lame road trip game, but one of many Rain Man-ian ticks I developed while driving and camping alone, spanning our country's most lunar surfaces - specifically northern Utah - doing maniacal things like rolling my tongue into a Tootsie Roll on the roof of my mouth, making noises I thought only my dog could hear and of course looking for Honda Civic HXs and never once finding one.

... Until yesterday on Siesta Key Beach, under the North Bridge facing the Ringling Causeway at 4 p.m. I obliviously parked next to one. A red HX. My car's hamster-like twin, dustier and littered with fishing tackle. Its owner, a Mexican kid in a Hanes undershirt, knee-deep in salt water, was futzing with a bucket of oily jacks flopping to and fro. And since I was in the middle of photographing someone for the paper, I stupidly forgot to snap a photo of the car.

Though I'll probably never see the thing again I drove home yesterday with a renewed sense of worldly order like now I can scratch the missing HX off my existential scavenger hunt. It's one of many scratch-offs on an assignment I gave myself years ago. The existential scavenger hunt assignment.

It started four years ago with a dog in the passenger seat of a truck. I was sitting in traffic at McKinley Parkway and Southwestern Boulevard in Hamburg, New York, staring at the truck parked next to me. Riding shotgun was a dog mangy from age, with a beaky face and once-crazy eyes. I remember sitting at the intersection we all called Seven Corners and looking over at Mangy Dog and thinking, shit Mangy Dog, I'll never see you again. This moment I'm sharing with you now at the Seven Corners in Hamburg, New York in one minute will be over and I'll never see you again.

At that time I had only a month to go before leaving New York for Florida. I was in that mode we all slip into before leaving a place for whoknowshowlong. It's a state of mind I describe as Steely Sadness. Before leaving a place you grow balls of steel. "I can do this. I'm cool. I'm free spirited dust in the wind. I'm the stuff you write home about. Eck. Ugh. Sigh." Which is such a farce, because really what happens is this:

You spot a mangy dog riding shotgun one day at an intersection famous for its deadly crashes and you start crying in spastic waves because you know this is It. You're looking into the once-crazy eyes of a beady-beaked dog and you're saying goodbye, out loud and in between snot-sucking sobs, you think: 'I'm 23 years old and this is the most pitiful moment I'm ever going to have. (Which we all know is not true.) And if I weren't at the wheel of this rattletrap jitney, at the deadliest intersection in Western New York, I'd be brought to my knees.' But you're wailing now like a breeched newborn slapped on the ass. And the dog is cocking its head and not blinking. And in his once-crazy eyes you see a shimmer of recognition (because glassy eyes make ghostly mirrors) and you know that in .3 seconds the light will go green, you'll grit your teeth and say buh-bye.

Thus you are born into what I call steely sadness.

Light turns green. Dog looks away. You press your foot to the pedal and accelerate. With the window down you hear the sound of your car's engine - not smooth, not steady, but high-pitched and throaty - and you shrug, because nonetheless you are moving.

I've not had another mangy dog moment. And like finding the HX yesterday (or as Joe calls it, "lampooning my white whale") I have no idea what it will mean if it happens again. I like to reckon it's one more kill in an existential scavenger hunt, though I fear it's just one more asinine thing I do to distract myself.

Ps. The picture above was taken in Jerome, Idaho. If anyone ever calls Idaho 'West-bum or East-bum' anything please dismiss it. Idaho is beautiful and solitary. Idaho sunsets cast the best pink-ish light I've ever seen blanket a field at dusk.